Related papers: Hostility Detection in UK Politics: A Dataset on O…
Concerns have reached the mainstream about how social media are affecting political outcomes. One trajectory for this is the exposure of politicians to online abuse. In this paper we use 1.4 million tweets from the months before the 2015…
Against a backdrop of tensions related to EU membership, we find levels of online abuse toward UK MPs reach a new high. Race and religion have become pressing topics globally, and in the UK this interacts with "Brexit" and the rise of…
Engaging with online social media platforms is an important part of life as a public figure in modern society, enabling connection with broad audiences and providing a platform for spreading ideas. However, public figures are often…
The 2019 UK general election took place against a background of rising online hostility levels toward politicians and concerns about its impact on democracy. We collected 4.2 million tweets sent to or from election candidates in the six…
Disengagement and disenchantment with the Parliamentary process is an important concern in today's Western democracies. Members of Parliament (MPs) in the UK are therefore seeking new ways to engage with citizens, including being on digital…
Social media has become an indispensable channel for political communication. However, the political discourse is increasingly characterized by hate speech, which affects not only the reputation of individual politicians but also the…
The rise of social media has been argued to intensify uncivil and hostile online political discourse. Yet, to date, there is a lack of clarity on what incivility means in the political sphere. In this work, we utilize a multidimensional…
Social media provides a critical communication platform for political figures, but also makes them easy targets for harassment. In this paper, we characterize users who adversarially interact with political figures on Twitter using…
COVID-19 has given rise to malicious content online, including online abuse and hate toward British MPs. In order to understand and contextualise the level of abuse MPs receive, we consider how ministers use social media to communicate…
Online abuse and threats towards politicians have become a significant concern in the Netherlands, like in many other countries across the world. This paper analyses gender differences in abuse received by Dutch politicians on Twitter,…
Adversarial interactions against politicians on social media such as Twitter have significant impact on society. In particular they disrupt substantive political discussions online, and may discourage people from seeking public office. In…
Social media has become extremely influential when it comes to policy making in modern societies, especially in the western world, where platforms such as Twitter allow users to follow politicians, thus making citizens more involved in…
The Internet and online forums such as Reddit have become an increasingly popular medium for citizens to engage in political conversations. However, the online disinhibition effect resulting from the ability to use pseudonymous identities…
We extend previous work about general election-related abuse of UK MPs with two new time periods, one in late 2018 and the other in early 2019, allowing previous observations to be extended to new data and the impact of key stages in the UK…
How similar are politicians to those who vote for them? This is a critical question at the heart of democratic representation and particularly relevant at times when political dissatisfaction and populism are on the rise. To answer this…
Studying political activity on social media often requires defining and measuring political stances of users or content. Relevant examples include the study of opinion polarization, or the study of political diversity in online content…
Despite attempts to increase gender parity in politics, global efforts have struggled to ensure equal female representation. This is likely tied to implicit gender biases against women in authority. In this work, we present a comprehensive…
Online political hostility is pervasive, yet it remains unclear how toxicity varies across campaign issues and political ideology, and what psychosocial signals and framing accompany toxic expression online. In this work, we present a…
The UK has had a volatile political environment for some years now, with Brexit and leadership crises marking the past five years. With this work, we wanted to understand more about how the global health emergency, COVID-19, influences the…
With the rise of social media, political conversations now take place in more diffuse environments. In this context, it is not always clear why some actors, more than others, have greater influence on how discussions are shaped. To…